kwong-juh duh

11 posts from February 2012

02/24/2012

If you read yesterday's blogpost and took action (whether that was donating or just spreading the word to others), THANK YOU. Not just for your contributions to the village rebuilding, but for demonstrating the good in people, and generously giving something to strangers with no expectation of ever getting anything in return. Witnessing acts of kindness always makes me cry a little. But it's all good. I'll take these tears any day.

02/23/2012

I don't usually blog while at work (sorry boss!) but this is important.

Recently there was a fire in a village in Uganda. Over 20 families lost EVERYTHING. Their homes AND businesses. Mothers, fathers, children, suddenly with nothing. What will they do? There is no UN Relief mission for a small village fire. Move in with family? Face untold hardship as they try to rebuild their lives? What happens to their kids? How do they feed them?

I am honored to call Johnny Long my friend, and there is a blogpost half done about why he inspires me. This isn't that post. This is the post telling you to go send him money, because he needs $1000 to buy sticks.

Even $5 helps. You don't need that latte today. Give more than one latte if you can. But give something.

It is about 11pm in Uganda right now. When Johnny wakes up, lets make sure he has the money he needs to rebuild these homes. There are no administrative fees being skimmed off your donation for his corporate car. The money goes to people who need it.

02/18/2012

I have spent the better part of three weeks working on a blogpost. Clearly it is not going well. I’ve kind of been all over the place while writing, so bear with me as I work on what is now the fifth attempt at getting this out of my head (each attempt with its own title no less).

It all started because I see the world through rose colored glasses, and I wanted to share this view. I choose to be an optimist, choose to see hope and potential in the future. I want to be happy. I try not to sweat the small stuff; I focus on the long term objective I want to achieve even if it requires a temporary step backwards or investment to achieve. I apply this to my life and the world around me, and any of my friends will tell you I can be completely insufferable when it comes to always looking on the bright side of life.

I also operate under the assumption that there is nothing unusual or extraordinary about this, all people want to be happy. People don’t want to be negative or depressed. People don’t want to be gripped with fear and insecurity. No one says “I want to live the rest of my life settling for mediocrity (or worse, unhappiness!) with no hope that things will ever really get markedly better than what they are today but just continue on a path of Good Enough.” That while they may have learned certain behaviors and responses to things based on past decisions/hurts, if they want to they can choose to change their approach, evaluate the current landscape, learn from the past, move forward.

Problem is, this may be a big pile of horseshit. As in, maybe some people don’t want to be happy.

WHAT? Nonsense you say? Yes, I’m sure if you ask anyone if they want to be happy, the answer will always be “hell yes!” And if you ask an 8 year old girl chances are good they will also tell you they want a pony with the same level of fervor and lack of critical thought.

Trust me, I struggle with this thought and feel guilty about such cynicism. I want to believe that happiness is universally available and attainable. Problem is, happy isn’t easy. Happy sometimes requires you to break out of your comfort zone, happy sometimes requires you to put yourself first (because the only person responsible for your happiness is you). Happy sometimes requires you to do a lot of introspection and Big Thinky Thoughts before you can move forward in the right direction. Happy frequently requires you to let go of some of the bullshit baggage you've been carrying with you. Happy sometimes requires you to change your existing paradigm for dealing with things and try something new and untested. Because if what you’ve been doing isn’t resulting in happiness, why on earth would continuing to do things that way result in anything different from what you’ve already got?

The topic of Choosing Happy (which is also in some ways Choosing Hope) been on my mind a lot since Thanksgiving. The sneaking suspicion that some people not only aren’t living up to their happiness potential and instead are settling for what they know out of fear or a pure lack of awareness that anything better truly exists, but actually want to keep wallowing in shit, because it is the shit they know and change is too uncomfortable. What if they change things and it is WORSE instead of BETTER? So they don’t even try, don’t dare to have faith and hope that they have the ability to improve things.

This makes me incredibly sad. It is heartbreaking to me to see people in unhealthy or unhappy situations. I can’t fix it for them, I can only encourage and try to inspire and provide moral support and pose questions to for them to think about. But I can’t make it better. Only they can do that, and in many cases they won’t.

I can't tell you all the hard decisions I’ve made, the fears I’ve worked to overcome, the things I've identified in myself as areas to work on, all the things I was doing or ways I was thinking that were holding me back from being the person I want to be. I'm not perfect, there are still things I am working to either break down or build up in myself. But I have forced myself to learn to have boundaries, even with people I love (and those are the hardest). And after a particularly rough year at work I learned to stop worrying about things I can't control and have faith in my problem solving skills to land on my feet. I make a conscious decision most every day to be happy and optimistic. Sure, I could point out every single thing that is wrong around me and bitch about it - I’m not oblivious to these things - but how does dwelling on the negative help improve the situation? I recognize limitations and areas for improvement but choose to emphasize the gifts and good things around me.

Because what is the point of life if you are going to spend it all miserable? Life is too short and precious to waste. Download 01 Closer to Fine

I expect more blogposts around the topic of happiness and overcoming fear in the future, I’ve got some friends I haven’t even told you about yet who inspire me to live life fully.

Note: this blogpost was not written about YOU. Whoever YOU are. There are countless people I encounter every day that deserve to find their path to joy, a path filled with hope and unlimited potential for good. Doesn't matter if you are my family, friends, random kids around the world, acquaintances, strangers in Anaheim or Amsterdam.

02/17/2012

Thanks to a coworker today I read about the application of disclosure policy to public health. Fascinating. And a little scary. I don't need to know how to mutate a virus to make it transmissable to mammals in order to protect myself.

Biosecurity experts fear mutated forms of the virus that research teams in The Netherlands and the United States independently created could escape or fall into the wrong hands and be used to spark a pandemic worse than the 1918-19 outbreak of Spanish flu that killed up to 40 million people.

WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl said that because of these fears, "there must be a much fuller discussion of risk and benefits of research in this area and risks of virus itself."

02/14/2012

Tonight was a more productive night than usual after the kids went to bed. I worked out on the heavy bag for 40 minutes, found my original iPhone and 80GB Zune while looking for something else (which I haven't found yet, but I'm not giving up, it has to be in the house somewhere), and while cooling down dug up few good websites to help me improve my boxing technique. No, I'm not getting *serious* about boxing, but I do want to know enough to be effective and less likely to hurt myself. First thing learned: I need to take some links out of the chain the bag is hanging from, even though I'm short, it is too low.

The heavy bag purchase was my first exercise equipment investment, and was inspired in part by a friend who uses one regularly as part of their workout routine. I was intrigued by the combination of strength and cardio training (and lets be honest, at $200 it has a great ROI). I hate running, stationary bikes kill my knees, and the elliptical is BORING. But I LOVE ROWING (if someone wants to get me a Concept2 rowing erg for my birthday this year that would be AWESOME) for much the same reason I like boxing. It is also cardio and strength training. And I LOVE strength training. Not for the muscle, I'm not going to go compete in bodybuilding competitions or anything. First it is the endorphins, second it is the pain. Knowing I'm sore short term for a long term health and fitness gain makes me feel mentally stronger. I know, that might be a little crazy.

Anyhow, the fact that both rowing and boxing require discipline to learn and follow proper technique is also appealing. It isn't just brute force or endurance, there is some subtlety, some skill development required. So far I have just been a spaz on the bag. Well, not a spaz, but definitely just doing my own thing, no form or technique at all. And just like with rowing, you can do that and get an ok workout. But you can also get hurt. And if you take the time to learn to do it right, you get a better workout. At least, that is true with rowing - if you do it right you feel it in your legs, core, back and arms afterwards. So time to actually learn what the fuck I'm doing, so I can do it a little bit better (and safer).

*and lazy. Really. Wanting to know how to box properly isn't enough - I have to actually take some action to make that happen. Unless I make the effort to learn from others who know a topic better than I do, I'll waste time figuring out basics and potentially ingrain some bad habits I later have to un-learn.

02/11/2012

So you've done the right thing with your Facebook profile, locking down your privacy settings to just your friends and maybe using some lists to manage who has visibility to what, and you aren't using the leaky Friends Of Friends setting. Then you get a new friend request from someone you know and have friends in common with, so you accept it.

02/08/2012

I have been thinking a lot lately about what makes me happy, and it isn't material possessions.

Don't get me wrong, I have a serious weakness for pretty clothing, nice cars, and the homes/furniture I dream of having are not inexpensive. But these things create comfort at best, not happiness.

Instead of collecting objects, I collect experiences. A great vacation. A concert. An amazing night out at a show. A weekend hotel getaway in the city 30 minutes away as an occasional treat, free of ambient 'I should do a load of laundry' mental overhead. All of these things are eleventybillion times better with a close companion (romantic love, best friend, kids) to share the experience with. These things bring me joy more enduring than any possession I own.

"People still believe that more money will make them happy, even though 35 years of research has suggested the opposite," Howell said. "Maybe this belief has held because money is making some people happy some of the time, at least when they spend it on life experiences."

This doesn't actually surprise me. I know tons of people who are very financially successful (not 1% but definitely upper tribe) but are unhappy. It saddens me to see people who have all the things we were raised thinking we are supposed to achieve to be happy, but still are not happy.

The world is too amazing and life is too short to not experience as much of it as you can and find happiness.

02/06/2012

Some folks don't understand why I would sanitize my Facebook history before the new Timeline format went live. That's ok. I'm comfortable with my paranoia.

But just in case you're on the fence, here are a couple more examples of why Facebook privacy is scary.

1. Facebook doesn't actually delete your deleted photos. Worried that picture of you drunk at the office holiday party might get in the hands of a potential future employer so you deleted it? It might not actually be gone. Sure, they say they will have this fixed in 4-8 weeks, but it sounds like that is the same thing they told ARS Technica in 2009 when the issue was first reported.

Sure, maybe you don't ever post comments or photos that you later regret, never over-share personal information, never post anything that can be misconstrued. If that is true, you've got nothing to worry about and you've got this whole social networking thing down better than most. Also, because you are such a worthy person of integrity, I need your bank information so I can complete a transfer of my family's funds to you that is being held by a dictator in Nigeria.

02/05/2012

I have often said that there are surely brilliant children born in countries where they don't have the opportunities we frequently take for granted in the United States (or any first-world country), and how that is rather tragic. What if there is a child with the intellectual horsepower to be the next Einstein but because he was born in Uruguay will never reach his full potential to positively impact the world because his life is focused on meeting basic needs? This is why I choose to donate to programs that help children in third world countries to have food, healthcare, and an education. In 2012 I continue to support Hackers For Charity and have started supporting World Vision. I don't tell you this so you can think I'm a good person, because I'm not. I don't donate nearly as much as I should, I like vacations to sunny places and pretty dresses too much. The reason to tell you who I donate to is so you can learn about these organizations and go donate too.

Unfortunately, it isn't just the third world that is economically disadvantaged. I recently read a really interesting article on the widening economic gap between the have and have not in America, and how the tribe you are born into in the US impacts your future. The article isn't just an opinion piece in support of the Occupy movement and spouting off about the 1%, but a review of a study of objective data controlled for race (with a few opinions at the end). The study - Coming Apart - turns a lot of political rhetoric about "the average american" on its head, and leads the article author to question the vilification of the 1% as little more than a comforting rationalization for the rest of the top 20% "upper tribe" to not be accountable for their negative impact on the lowest 30% "lower tribe".

The concept of tribes likely seems foreign to most Americans, a throwback to our primitive beginnings or putting us on the same evolutionary footing as less advanced cultures who still live isolated in rain forests or nomadic deserst. But if you consider the word objectively it is quite accurate even in modern America.

tribe/trīb/

Noun:

A social division in a traditional society consisting of families or communities linked by social, economic, religious, or blood ties,...

(in ancient Rome) Each of several political divisions, originally three, later thirty, ultimately thirty-five.

Synonyms:

clan - race - family

I was born into the lower tribe, but have managed to work my way into the upper tribe. This affords my children opportunities that my siblings children will have to work ten times harder to gain access to. This actually breaks my heart, not for my kids but for my nieces and nephews. Children are innocent, they are all born with nothing but potential. They have no control over the circumstances they are born into, they can only try to make the best of what they have, in a world where they have very little control over how they are raised.

It would be easy to look at my personal history and use it as justification to say there is no problem with the status quo. After all, I got out of the lower tribe through hard work, so anyone can do it if they just pull up their pampers, quit complaining, and bear down, right? Wrong. I am the exception, not the rule. I got lucky, and met a guy who was from a family that had been in the upper tribe, but had scaled back to the upper middle tribe. If he hadn't crossed tribe lines to date me I might not have made it out. So believe me when I tell you as a occupant of both lower and upper tribes that this IS a major problem. Don't believe me? The United Nations reported on this in 2008, with a warning that large economic gaps destabilize society. Not revolutionary news, this has been true throughout history.

I'm going to download the book "Coming Apart" to my Kindle app and I am sure it will be interesting, but my reading it will probably be ineffective in actually creating positive change. The people who most need to read this book probably don't realize they need to read it, because they either don't believe there is a problem or if there is, believe they aren't part of it. *sigh*

**2/5/12 note** It is worth mentioning that my mother comes from the upper tribe and of all her children, I had the most exposure to that world and the behavioral and academic expectations. This was tremendously formative and gave me advantages my nieces and nephews don't have.

Despite being very public and communicative, I'm also intensely private about some things (and I'm human, so not perfect and mess this up sometimes). So I've spent the last 4 nights after the kids went to bed going through every post I've ever made starting in 2007 and looking for things I wanted to delete. It was actually rather fascinating. A few random things I discovered:

I post a lot of lyrics - which if you read my blog in the beginning and played NTT shouldn't be a surprise. I <3 music.

Several interesting articles had forgotten about and will likely blog about soon.

I had insomnia a lot in 2009 and 2010.

I had some great vacations, usually with my friend Lori.

Average 6 headaches a year.

Conceeding that I have broadcast a lot of content (too much content really, going to work on curbing this a bit in 2012 because posting "chocolate binge!" or "watching Kung Fu Panda 2 with the kids" is low signal/high noise), I didn't find a bunch of horribly emo posts . Certainly not as many as I expected. I deleted far more "4.5 hours into a migraine" and posts that discussed financial matters (bills, savings balances, tax returns) or information about my kids than I did posts that were over-exposing my personal emotions.

And while this Facebook sanitization project pre-empted a blogpost I'm half done writing and really excited about, I'm glad I took the time to go through it all. It was like reading headlines from 4 years of journal entries. Not all memories are happy, but they are all good to have. Every experience, good or bad, is a learning opportunity. Can't learn if you don't remember the lesson.

Other semi-related things done this week to clean up my online footprint:

tightened up my Facebook lists (yes, I use lists to target content to specific groups of people; the men don't care about the new mascara I tell my #girlfriends about, #family really doesn't understand or care about my #business, and #business doesn't need to be seeing photos of my kids or vacations)

archived and deleted social networking profiles I don't use *cough*G+*cough*

cleaned out my IM contact list.

Ah, IM. I haven't logged into IM in probably a year, because the vast majority of my contacts weren't actually friends I wanted to talk to but people I've worked with at one time or another in the last 12 years. So as I've done in the past with Facebook and Twitter, I went on a culling spree and deleted probably 75 people, most of whom I haven't spoken to in a year or more. It is a strange weight lifted, to say that I'm only going to be friends with people I'm actually friends with.